A Covert Affair (39 page)

In February, Paul was told he was being transferred to Marseille. With Julia's work and book partners based in Paris, they returned often, and always made a point of stopping by Jane's apartment for a drink and a visit.
“Every time we went to Paris we would see her,”
Julia reported to her OSS colleagues. As usual, they traded bits of gossip about mutual friends before moving straight to politics. The news on both fronts was distressing.

A number of journalists they had known well during the war had seen their careers come to an abrupt halt. Ed Snow, who had written favorably of Mao, had come under suspicion, been questioned by the FBI, and asked to disclose the full extent of his Communist activities. While he had not been subpoenaed, the Washington whispering gallery had him as good as tried and guilty. After he quit the conservative
Saturday Evening Post
over a disagreement with his editors, Snow found that all opportunities for work had suddenly evaporated. Jane heard he had moved to Switzerland. To avoid being similarly blacklisted, Teddy White, who had by then broken with Henry Luce and
Time
, had moved to Paris and was playing it safe, avoiding anything related to China and churning out upbeat stories about America's efforts to rebuild Europe through the Marshall Plan. His book
Thunder Out of China
had been a huge best seller in 1946, but with the country now in the fevered grip of McCarthyism, he was under a cloud of suspicion and being monitored by the FBI.
“I hate only a very few people,”
Julia raged in a letter to a friend. “One being Madame Brassart, head of Cordon Bleu, who is a
nasty, mean woman; McCarthy, whom I don't know; and Old Guard Republicans, whom I see as little as possible.”

That's when the stories about the book burning began. Both Ed Snow and Teddy White were on McCarthy's target list. They were blacklisted authors whose works had to be expelled from the USIS libraries. In March, McCarthy's two investigators, Roy Cohn and David Schine, descended unannounced on the Paris embassy.
“These two men are young lawyers—about 26—typical Fascist bully-boy types, v. reminiscent to one chap here of Hitler's Gestapo agents—filled w/the euphoria of 2nd-hand power and riding roughshod over everybody,”
Paul wrote Charles.

It seems clear that they came not so much to investigate as to make it appear to their constituents and followers in the States that they were in Europe collecting on-the-spot facts. The three concepts which they brought with them—and which they are out to make the public believe—are: (1) USIS is following a pro-Communist line, as proved by either titles or authors of books in our libraries. (2) USIS is wasting the taxpayer's money by featherbedding, duplication of effort & empire building. (3) The personnel of USIS & other agencies abroad is riddled by people who are security risks, either because they are followers of the Party line, or because they are sex perverts.

The next day, after a rude interview with the ambassador in their hotel bedroom, during which they forked scrambled eggs and made idle accusations, they abruptly took off for Bonn. The upshot, as far as Paul could tell, was
“25 minutes of insolence, unproven charges, and threats to embassy officials, men who were older, wiser, more experienced, and certainly more devoted to the interests of the United States than they were.”
Apparently, more such visits were to be expected.

As the summer months went by, the atmosphere in the Marseille office grew increasingly strained. Since McCarthy decided to attack the USIS, Paul had seen its monthly book purchases shrink from 20,000 to a meager 1,592. At the same time, he had been ordered to compile
a list of all the volumes on its shelves so that they might be reviewed and then either removed, refiled, or destroyed. Another
“undercurrent of anxiety,”
Julia recalled, was the retrenchment being ordered by the congressional bean counters, who were allocating more and more money to the military and steadily cutting back on the postwar goodwill programs. It was all part of what Julia described in an irate epistle as the increasing
“yellow-bellyism in Washington.”
Meanwhile, Paul was getting very disgruntled. He was no “yes-man,” and he hated carrying out McCarthy's mad purge of their little Marseille library.
“He's emasculating and stamping the life out of the Information Program,”
Paul lamented to Charles. “He's a dirty and astute demagogue, advancing himself, like a surfboard rider, on a wave of fear.”

McCarthy's Red scare was fueled by names. All he had to do was set his sights on an institution for its leaders to begin turning on their own. Even at USIS, which Julia described as a
“stepchild”
organization and “not really part of the brotherhood,” the chilling effect made itself felt in the constant rumors about missed promotions, arbitrarily denied appointments, and exile to remote posts. No one, it seemed, was above suspicion or immune from scrutiny. Paul, with his long history of leftist politics and many artist friends who were avowed Communists, had to tread carefully. In the current “better safe than sorry” climate, it would take only a word for him to be out of a job. Julia expressed her growing anxiety in a letter to Avis DeVoto, who had become a close friend and confidante.
“I am terribly worried about McCarthyism,”
Julia wrote. “What can I do as an individual? It is frightening. I am ready to bare my breasts (small size though they be), stick out my neck, won't turn my back on anybody, will sacrifice cat, cookbook, husband, and finally self….”

Julia had first written to Avis's husband, Bernard DeVoto, a well-known columnist, after reading his meditation on the shortcomings of stainless steel knives. Julia, who was of like mind, had sent him a French carbon steel paring knife and a note, initiating an exchange of letters that grew into a steady correspondence. She had turned to Avis for advice because she knew that Bernard had stood up to McCarthy in the past. He had done so most notably in his “Easy Chair” column in
the October 1949 issue of
Harper's
, in which he, after being interviewed by the FBI, dared to mock the prying, snooping style of the HUAC squad in its hunt for closet Communists. In “Due Notice to the FBI,” DeVoto, taking a page from one of his wife's cookbooks, imagined how a grilling of a Republican presidential candidate might proceed:

Does Harry S. Dewey belong to the Wine and Food Society? The Friends of Escoffier? Has he ever attended a meeting of either group? Does he associate with members of either? Has he ever been present at a meeting of any kind, or at a party, at which a member of either was also present? Has he ever read A. Brillat-Savarin's
The Physiology of Taste
? Does he associate with people who have read it? Has he ever been present at a meeting or a party at which anyone who has read it was also present?

Halfway through the article, DeVoto abandoned his farce and told his readers that he was fed up. The Red-baiting had “gone too far.” McCarthy and his henchmen were dividing the country into “the hunted and the hunters.” He ended by publicly declaring that he was done answering questions: “From now on any representative of the government, properly identified, can count on a drink and perhaps informed talk about the Red (but non-Communist) Sox at my house. But if he wants information from me about anyone whatsoever, no soap.”

The FBI had been furious and opened a file on DeVoto. In a speech about Adlai Stevenson, the Democratic presidential candidate in 1952, McCarthy took aim against DeVoto, who worked for the campaign, attacking him as a Communist sympathizer who in 1947 had led a Boston delegation from the American Civil Liberties Union protesting the ban on a speech by the wife of Gerhardt Eisler, a Communist who had disappeared behind the Iron Curtain. McCarthy went so far as to try to cast DeVoto's activities in a questionable light by quoting the Communist
Daily Worker
. DeVoto calmly maintained he could be anti-Communist and still want to uphold the freedom of speech as guaranteed by the Constitution. He told reporters at the time that he
had done nothing then that he would not do for the senator, adding,
“I think the United States will survive both McCarthy and the Communists.”
It was a politically brave response, but it earned DeVoto the special antipathy of both McCarthy and J. Edgar Hoover, who instructed the FBI to keep the writer under close watch and dig for dirt. Avis DeVoto, who knew what her husband's flair for controversy had cost—the headlines, hate mail, and constant attacks from critics on the right—warned Julia that if Paul valued his diplomatic career they should keep out of the line of fire.

Try as she might, Julia could not keep a lid on her indignation. Anger came at a boiling rush when she read in March 1954 that McCarthy's witch hunt had reached her alma mater, Smith College. A Mrs. Aloise B. Heath of the so-called Committee for Discrimination in Giving had accused five faculty members of being associated with organizations that were
“Communist fronts”
in a mailing alerting alumnae to the presence of “traitors” on campus. Mrs. Heath also accused the college of “knowingly harboring” the turncoats and insinuated that there were others, as yet unnamed, who were trying to subvert the young minds at the school. She also suggested people withhold donations to the college as they were being used to fund Communists. In classic McCarthyesque style, the accusations, made by an anonymous group of alumnae without any supporting evidence, were released to the public before any attempt was made to ascertain the facts or allow Smith's president the opportunity to reply.

Taking her cue from Bernard DeVoto, Julia took a strong, principled stand in her letter to Mrs. Heath, who happened to be the sister of William F. Buckley and sister-in-law of L. Brent Bozell, who had coauthored a defense of McCarthy as a patriotic crusader against Communism. Julia sternly chastised her fellow alumna for acting as an informer without any proof and for failing to employ
“proper democratic methods”
in dealing with “charges of this grave nature”:

This is the theory of the “end justifying the means.” This is the method of the totalitarian governments. It makes no difference how you do it: lie, steal, murder, bear false witness, but use any
method fair or foul as long as you reach your goal…. In Russia today, as a method of getting rid of opposition, an unsubstantiated implication of treason, such as yours, is often used. But it should never be used in the United States.

She pointed out that in this fraught period of history, it was imperative that young people learn to
“sift truth from half-truth, demagoguery from democracy, totalitarianism, in any form, from liberty.”
To that end, she was sending Smith College a copy of the letter, along with a check doubling her annual contribution to the alumnae fund. She added, acidly,
“For the colleges harbor the ‘dangerous' people, the people who know how to think, whose minds are free.”

Smith's president, Benjamin F. Wright, stated that he had “complete confidence” in his staff and objected to the anonymous group's sneak attack on the college. In May, the five accused faculty members were dragged before the Massachusetts Un-American Activities Committee. By the time the hearings were over and all the testimony heard, the subcommittee charged with the investigation had found no evidence of illegal or disloyal activity, and the matter was dropped. Julia was pleased to discover that Mrs. Heath's strategy backfired, at least to the extent that as a result of her poisonous letter more loyal alumnae poured more money into Smith's coffers than ever before. But the damage to the reputations of teachers, and that of the college, could never be undone.

In a rare act of open defiance, Julia sent a copy of her letter to her father. She was motivated in part by pride, for it had taken considerable courage on her part to speak out, and in part by sheer pique at his continued confidence in a
“desperate power-monger”
she believed was destroying a country that had come out of the war the strongest, most unified nation on earth. No doubt some of her rancor stemmed from the memory of her own thoughtlessness and political naïveté and a time not so long before when she might have failed to recognize the danger inherent in McCarthy's Red scare, with its reckless innuendo and ad hoc retribution. It pained her to think that her dear old Pop was
“right in there with them [the McCarthyites].”

Not surprisingly, her father took a dim view of her exercise in moral
outrage and did not mince his words, scolding his daughter for
“supporting the Communist line.”
In letter after letter, he pounded away at his favorite paranoid theme.
“These people with red badges have to be exposed,”
he insisted. “It's a hard, dirty job that has to be done and it takes a rough-and-ready person like McCarthy to do it. In his zeal he gets out of bounds now and then but that's our business.” He was convinced that Julia and her husband were “falling right into the plan the Reds [were] developing—that of creating dissension and distrust among their enemies.” They had fallen prey to the “socialistic element in Europe” and would do well to come home for a refresher course in real American patriotism. Paul literally felt ill at the thought and had to lie down.

In October, Paul was transferred again. He and Julia fit in a quick visit with Jane, stopping in Paris for a few hours en route to their new post in Bonn. It was a merry occasion as always, full of drinks, toasts to the future, laughter and talk. There was nothing memorable to eat, of course, but the company more than compensated for the lack of food. Paul and Julia were a bit pressed for time that afternoon and kept an eye on the clock. In their hurry to be off, grabbing up coats and bags and calling hasty
adieus
over their shoulder, they never dreamed of what was to come. How were they to know that disaster lay just around the corner? That what Bernard DeVoto had once called
“the avalanching danger”
of rumor, insinuation, slander, and malice hung over them all? The quiet men with credentials were closing in. They never heard them coming.